The OPs solution is the only valid solution they have open to them though.

The personal solution is to not buy monitors from manufacturers that fail to put EDID chips in their HDMI signal path. The set of manufacturers that do this is well-documented.

I walked into an Apple Store and asked, “What monitor/TV should I buy such that my AppleTV remote can control the volume and be the only remote I need?” The geniuses shrugged. I asked, “What brand are these displays in the store that are connected to the demonstration AppleTVs?” They shrugged. We turned them around so I could see the backs of the monitors and I wrote down the model numbers.

It is far from obvious to me.

I give up. I couldn’t find that list. Where do I look?

It would be useful to know what brands to avoid.

There's probably a list somewhere on the internet but I've never seen one. When I went monitor shopping six months ago, I used the Macrumors forum heavily. There are long threads on the forum for monitors which didn't work well because of edid or other factors. That's how I ended up with an Asus ProArt 4k instead of the Dell I initially wanted. Everyone complained about how MacOS handled the Dell but no one had a bad word for the Asus.

Though it was a little frustrating to me that I had to monitor shop in the first place. I bought an MBA to start some iOS projects. I wanted to use my still great 1080 IPS Dell screen that I had used for years with Windows and Linux. But MacOS looked absolutely horrid on it. I know MacOS prefers higher resolution screens, but I was surprised it couldn't manage to handle a ridiculously common resolution.

All the Dell monitors I've ever tried have worked just fine. Including the lower resolution models. On those, you don't get the Retina crisp display, but it still works.

Of course, I avoid HDMI like the plague. I only use DisplayPort unless I have no other option, and then I don't hold out much hope that the display maker did anything right.

Oh, ok, so the OP should, as a consumer, know about all monitor standards before purchasing one. Good to know.

Let's shorten that to: buy reputable monitors, from brand names you recognize. You wouldn't buy a no-name car.

You underestimate my cheapness and lack of caring about my car. Bring me a Chinese cherry car and I'll replace my 10 year old Suzuki

This seems like bad advice. A little bit of Googling for solutions to this found this thread[1] which identified (old) Dell monitors as being one of the problems.

[1] https://embdev.net/topic/284710

That's basically the current state of computers. Some vendors care more than others. I'm sure there are ASUS monitors out there that don't work correctly with ASUS laptops, but if you buy an Apple monitor it probably works with an Apple laptop from the same vintage. That's just how things are. The market seems to prioritize "new" over "good". Doesn't mean you can't do some research to get "new" and "good" though.

Yup, the solution is to not buy apple laptops.

Almost agreed. There are passthrough dongles that will report whatever EDID you want.

However, I think the original complaint is still valid. No highly-technical one-off solution solves the fundamental issue of general usability.

All usability comes down to what you're used to. I can't use Mac OS because I don't use Mac OS. Sit me down in front of a Mac and it is practically useless to me, nothing works right, same thing with iPhones. They don't "just work" for me.

This is not to say I couldn't learn, if forced to. That's what happened when I started using windows, Linux, and Android after all.

For general usability you need agreement on one way of doing something. Cars are this, you can drive pretty much any car because of the standard way the interface is put together.

My main issue with people responding to any criticism of Apple is that Apple fans (especially hardcore) can't accept that the Mac OS/iPhone interface isn't perfect and doesn't work for everyone.

Mostly agree. IME it really depends on the person. And Microsoft has valued backward compatibly and pragmatic solutions almost to a fault at times. I'd day that's been changing since Windows 8. Still as a DOS-then-Windows native I appreciate their approach.

Job's insistence on a one button mouse for decades, then a one button phone bordered on the absurd as devices grew in capability. Yet it did serve a portion of the market well enough. Even if it kept advanced features virtually impossible to discover with being taught. Doubtful my boomer parents will ever learn swipe gestures, yet my 4yo is doing them now.

It appears there is a script that may help: https://gist.github.com/ejdyksen/8302862

Not a great solution though - seems like a UI option to turn this off if it is as widespread as it seems.

As a person, who just wants to use that damn thing your reply sounds a bit like:

"You're holding it wrong"

Wouldn't that mean windows is superior in handling those monitors by applying the solution so the user won't need to go looking?

I understand the monitor manufacturers are at fault but the OS tries to be as compatible as possible and handles the hardware.

No—Windows takes a strictly worse approach. macOS [and Linux] give you “some [not to spec] monitors have very slightly blurry text”; but Windows gives you “some TVs just plain don’t work at all.”

Note how I didn’t say that the TVs are not-to-spec; that’s because the EDID spec allows TVs to just not report an EDID (TVs are low-margin, and that’s one fewer chip on the signal path), where the video source then must assume some standard default modes (e.g. 1080p@60 YUV 4:2:2.) But monitors, meanwhile, must report an EDID. Why?

Because all this only applies over HDMI; and HDMI is a protocol for talking to TVs first-and-foremost, which is why the EDID spec assumes YUV as the fallback.

Monitors generally have DisplayPort inputs; and if you plug Windows or macOS into a monitor over DisplayPort, it’ll always go SRGB, because YUV isn’t a video mode the DisplayPort protocol can even carry.

So when a monitor has an HDMI input, it’s essentially doing “TV compatibility” over that input—and it needs to report its capabilities with an EDID, lest the video source think it’s a TV and send base TV spec signals to it.

Which all makes the situation even more ridiculous: there are TVs that Windows can’t talk to over HDMI, despite the HDMI connection implying. and the EDID spec explicitly stating, that Windows should make the fallback/safety assumption that it’s talking to a TV.

Also keep in mind that this is a prisoner’s dilemma: the only reason that monitor manufacturers are able to “get away with” being nonconformant to the EDID spec is because of Windows’ leniency. Windows is the “defector” here. If Windows stopped allowing it, then nobody would be allowing it, and so the monitor manufacturers would have to shape up.

Thank you for the detailed explanation. Learned something new.

> That’s not the correct solution. The correct solution is for the monitor manufacturer to stop reporting an EDID that identifies their monitor as a TV (and thereby forces the OS to default to YUV rather than SRGB.)

Is this an EDID issue? OP didn't specify what the "non Mac monitor" is, but I'd expect it to be a lower DPI one. I get the blurry text on an Apple Thunderbolt Display, too.

I think this is related to the removal of sub-pixel antialiasing in Mac OS a few versions back.

I just stopped reporting edid on my display and wow it looks so great now, thanks!

It could just be macOs's staggeringly bad text rendering on low dpi displays.

I believe that subpixel font rendering being removed several years ago is the cause.

Actually the correct solution is to buy a laptop that just works.

Nobody cares if Apple are following a spec, they care about the experience of using their hardware. And it's awful.